Inventive Orangutans Make Hook Tools to Retrieve Food

Sci-News.com ^ | News Staff / Source | Nov 12, 2018

[ETL]

Orangutans are among the most intelligent primates. They have human-like long-term memory, routinely use a variety of sophisticated tools in the wild and construct elaborate sleeping nests each night from foliage and branches. ..."

“The hook-bending task has become a benchmark paradigm to test tool innovation abilities in comparative psychology,” said co-author Dr. Alice Auersperg, a scientist at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna.

“Considering the speed of their hook innovation, it seems that orangutans actively invented a solution to this problem rather than applying routined behaviors.”

“In the study, we confronted Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) with a vertical tube containing a reward basket with a handle and a straight piece of wire and, in a second task, with a horizontal tube containing a reward at its center and a piece of wire that was bent at 90 degrees,” Dr. Laumer explained.

“Retrieving the reward from the vertical tube thus required the orangutans to bent a hook into the wire to fish the basket out of the tube. The horizontal tube in turn required the apes to unbent the bent piece of wire in order to make it long enough to push the food out of the tube.”

Several orangutans mastered the hook bending task and the unbending task. Two orangutans even solved both tasks within the first minutes of the very first trial.

“The orangutans mostly bent the hooks directly with their teeth and mouth while keeping the rest of the tool straight,” Dr. Laumer said.

“Thereafter they immediately inserted it in correct orientation, hooked the handle and pulled the basket up.”

“Finding this capacity in one of our closest relatives is astonishing,” said co-author Dr. Josep Call, a researcher at the University of St Andrews, UK.

[cuban leaf]

Our local crows can do reasonable clutch replacements, but the modern cars tax their skills.

[Noamie]

Sry. I thought it was funny.